When potential customers search Google for specific words, those are the words they want to see. Wouldn’t you agree?

I mean if you search for a “Search Marketer” you don’t want someone else telling you that “Online Marketer” does about the same thing. You see, in every industry there are few different words that can be used to describe your product or service. And you can be sure that people will use different words to search for what you do.

So … why would you tell your, let’s say 60% of site visitors that the name they typed is not the name you use (even though it’s the same thing) ? Why would you confuse them and tell them that a “Bottled water” is the same as “Water in a bottle” ?

If you start teaching people that there are other names to what you sell, you’re most likely confusing them. Instead, just change your language. Change your headline to use that keyword they type. Change your body copy, change your bullets points…

It’s simple: speak their language and your conversion to sales will increase.

I think most search marketers will buy your assertion on the face or will have a sneaking suspicion that it is one of those rare “truths” that they will have to adopt.

Only problem is that most organizations don’t vest control of keywords and control of site in the same person or group (for many good reasons), so you still end up with tragic mismatches.

For example, a search on the term “pickup” recently returned a page of paid searches including one from Ford Direct. Click it, and you get a page of sedans. I blogged about this peculiar sort of Landing Page Optimization.

My first goal when working with search marketers is to get the folks buying the ads to assert some level of control over existing site pages that are used as landing pages so that they can capitalize on just what you are articulating.